Commercial displays such as those used in trade show booths require strong structures that can be easily transported and configurable in a wide variety of forms. Such structures need to be lightweight, portable, and able to be quickly set up and broken down.
Prior art solutions have utilized truss members with folding elements that utilize rigid wall members coupled with rotatable wall members. The rotatable side members allow the truss to collapse. The trusses include internal diagonal pivoting members that serve to lock the truss into an open position. Although useful in some applications, this approach has deficiencies.
Using differently designed rigid and rotatable wall members increases the required inventory of piece parts needed to build the truss, thereby making the truss more complicated and expensive to manufacture. More importantly, the non-symmetry of the assembled structure (due to the non-rigidity of the rotatable wall members) gives such a truss non-uniform load bearing characteristics when deployed horizontally. Therefore, if the user is not careful and/or cognizant of the requirement for a certain orientation, a structure according to the prior art design might be deployed in an unsafe manner with potentially catastrophic results.
What is needed is a collapsible/foldable truss member that is strong, easy fabricated and easily assembled into a temporary or permanent structure for a commercial display or other structural application. What is further needed is a truss member that can be configured to provide horizontal support regardless of the truss member's orientation. The present invention fulfills these and other needs, and addresses other deficiencies of prior art implementations.